Hershel Greene-Rhee
by Ursula Antonia
Summary: Hershel Greene-Rhee never meets his father.


Hershel Greene-Rhee never meets his father.

He pieces together his own idea of who Glenn Rhee was with the help of a short video and stories from those who knew him and a grave that is unmarked when he first visits it as a young child, and more than anything, in the way his mother lives the rest of her life.

—–-–—

"Are you ever gonna love anyone again?" he asks when he's five and she's tucking him in.

"I love _you_ ," she says, kissing his nose and then brushing his dark hair off his forehead, "and Enid, and Aunt Tara."

"No," he corrects her, "I mean like Uncle Rick loves Aunt Michonne or Aunt Tara loves Aunt Rosita or Uncle Aaron loves Uncle Eric."

She pulls back, some unreadable emotion flickering across her face, and for a few seconds she looks like she can't speak. Then she smiles tightly and murmurs, "I'm too busy to love anyone else, baby. And I'm always gonna love your daddy." She smooths his quilt like she doesn't know what else to do with her hands, then kisses his forehead. "Goodnight, Hersh. I love you."

(He knows now that her nights didn't end when his did—she came home to eat dinner with him and read or play until bedtime, then left him with Enid or Aunt Tara or Uncle Eric or whoever else was available and trustworthy on any given night while she returned to her council and whatever duties awaited her at the Barrington House.

 _"I'm too busy to love anyone else"_ is her go-to reply for the rest of her life. When he was a child, he thought she meant busy taking care of him him, or running the Hilltop Colony, but now he thinks she meant that she was still too busy loving Glenn.)

—–-–—

When he's eight, his mother kills Negan.

Tara doesn't let him watch the execution, but he hears his father's murderer die—a single bullet to the head, a merciful death after the agony he had inflicted on so many. There had been arguments for something worse— _many_ arguments: burning alive, drawing and quartering, even turning Lucille on her master, but his mother had put her foot down.

When the body drops heavily to the ground, followed seconds later by his mother's gun, he is suddenly grateful he isn't watching.

"Burn it, feed it to the pigs, I don't care," his mother says in a hollow tone he's never heard before.

By the time he looks, Negan's body is already being carried away and his mother is nowhere to be found. He eats dinner with an unusually quiet Aaron and Eric, and Tara sends him to bed with a promise that his mother will be home when he wakes up in the morning.

Instead, he wakes in the middle of the night to voices outside his room.

"I just—I thought—I thought this would be _closure_." His mother's voice is thick and choked; she's been crying. "It's been eight years and I still wake up expecting Glenn to be there some mornings. I thought seeing Negan die—killing him—maybe I would be able to let go…"

"Maggie—oh, honey." He can picture Aunt Tara pulling his mother into a hug, and for several long minutes, all he can hear are his mother's muffled sobs and Tara's reassuring murmurs. "He wouldn't want—"

"Don't," his mother whispers tearily, "please, don't. I—I should get to bed, and you should get home."

"Maggie…"

"Please. I'm okay, Tara, I promise." And his mother's voice is already getting steadier, even if it's still softer than usual—he's never known anyone with more self control.

When he gets up the next morning, she has breakfast waiting and greets him with a hug and an apology. There's a hint of redness around her eyes and she's wearing an old shirt he's never seen before—it's too big for her lean frame, but she has it wrapped closely around herself.

(A few years later, he'll find the bag of his father's clothes at the back of her closet and he'll understand.)

—–-–—

He's twelve and kneeling in the garden with his mother, pulling up weeds from around their tomato plants, when he catches her staring at him oddly. "You just looked so much like Glenn—like your father—for a minute there," she says with a hint of a smile. She shakes her head, her smile lingering, and returns to weeding, leaving him to watch her instead. Her brown hair is falling out of its ponytail and she has a smear of dirt on her forehead where she wiped sweat away earlier.

It's not that he's never missed his father—or just having _a_ father in the general sense—before, but the loss hits him like a physical blow now, takes his breath away for a moment, and all he can do is stare at his mother, at the ring caked with dirt on her fourth finger.

It's as if his father previously existed only as a theoretical idea, or a character in a book, and now it's finally sinking in that Glenn Rhee was a real, living, breathing person. He doesn't know why this realization has only occurred to him now; it's certainly not the first time his mother—or someone else—has told him he looks or behaves like his father (or his grandfather, or his aunt, for that matter).

"How?" he asks quietly, dark eyes intent.

She looks up again. "How what?"

"How—how did I look like him?" His tone is uncertain, hesitant; he isn't sure if this is the time or place for this conversation.

His mother sits back on her heels; apparently it is the time and place. "He used to make the same expression when he was focusing on something in the garden at the prison, or our little one in Alexandria," she begins, and her tone is just as uncertain as his had been a few seconds earlier. "There are so many little things… there's so much of him in you, Hersh." She goes silent, and her voice breaks when she speaks again. "I want you to know as much as you can about your father, but only on your terms—when you want to, when you're ready, okay? He wasn't… I want you to know about him as a person. He wasn't perfect, but he was _good_ , so, so good."

He's nodding silently and something is aching and raw inside him, but it's a purposeful kind of pain, like growing pains. He feels like something he didn't even know was broken is slowly beginning to heal for both of them.

—–-–—

There's something different about his mother's stories after that day in the garden. His father was never a taboo subject, but in the months and years that follow, the stories about him seem to bring his mother a sort of quiet happiness—serenity, even. He asks more questions and she gives him all the answers she can, even if those answers are sometimes _"I just don't know, baby."_

There are occasional periods when he almost feels as if his father is there with them.

She starts a journal, writes down every memory and fact about their family that she can recall, and promises it will be Hershel's when she's gone. He tries several times—especially as a teenager—to sneak peeks, but she always manages to keep it hidden from him. He never learns if she had a hiding spot he never found, or if she just kept it with her at all times.

(In the end, it doesn't really matter. It, and all the memories it holds, are eventually his to keep.)

—–-–—

Maggie Greene dies just weeks before her sixtieth birthday, not of a walker bite or a bullet but of terminal cancer. More accurately, she requests assisted suicide on her own terms over a long, drawn out, agonizing death. For all thirty-four years of Hershel's life, she has put the needs of the Hilltop Colony before her own; she has sacrificed, bled, and cried for these people, and in return, her council votes unanimously to grant her final request.

On a cool morning in early fall, Hershel pushes his mother's wheelchair through the garden—the vegetable garden, not the flower garden; she's always had an odd fondness for the tomatoes—while seven-year-old Bethany zigzags in and out of view along the garden paths with her braid flying behind her and Judith helps George toddle along on wobbly, inexperienced legs. It's all so painfully normal that it almost feels surreal, and for an hour or so he grounds himself in his mother's voice and his daughter's laughter and and his wife's soft encouragements to their son and he lets himself pretend this is a day like any other.

He sits at her bedside as her loved ones trickle in one by one to say gentle, tender farewells, until finally he and elderly Dr. Carson, who came out of retirement for a day especially for his mother's sake, are the only ones left in the room. His mother smiles her steady, familiar smile and reaches out a hand to him. He holds it carefully, thumb tracing her ring, until her eyes slowly close and her fingers go limp in his grip. Then he stumbles to his feet, tears blurring his vision as he reaches for his knife. He leans over his mother's still frame—so small in death—brushes her graying hair to the side, and presses a tender kiss to her creased forehead before he puts her down.

He takes the battered journal from the bedside table as he leaves the room.

The rest of the day is a blur of condolences and tears, but even as he sobs into Judith's shoulder that night and sinks into their bed with a heavy heart, he's grateful that his mother went peacefully. After a long, hard life, she at least had the dignity of choosing her own death. He understands how important that decision was to her after all the stories of his father's brutal murder.

It doesn't make her absence any easier to bear in those first days and weeks without her.

—–-–—

On his thirty-fifth birthday, Hershel Greene-Rhee walks through the woods with a bouquet of wildflowers in one hand and little Bethany's hand in his other. When he was a child, the idea of leaving the Hilltop so casually—with only a knife tucked in his boot—was outlandish, but this territory is safe now, in large part due to his mother's efforts.

Together, he and Bethany pull the weeds from around the two graves and replace the last withered bouquet. His parents' graves are marked by matching large, flat stones now, each inscribed with a name and dates of birth and death. Hershel sinks to his knees and runs calloused fingers reverently over the inscriptions until he feels his daughter's small hand on his shoulder. He looks at her, a smudge of dirt on her face and her hair falling out of her braid, and musters a smile.

"Did you know Grandpa?"

"Not really, but sometimes it feels like I did."

She looks confused, in that innocent childish way of hers. "Will you tell me about him?"

He smiles again and the weight in his chest lessens. "Well, Bethie," he pauses to brush a few loose strands of brown hair off of his daughter's face, "a long time ago—before walkers—there was a big city called Atlanta, and a little farm not far away…"

And maybe the story he tells his little girl isn't perfectly accurate; maybe the true version of events died with his parents. He can't, after all, even begin to imagine a city as big and busy as Atlanta once was, and the concept of pizza deliver boys is entirely foreign and seems like an unnecessary complication in what was already a complex world—but he knows the important points: Glenn Rhee and Maggie Greene were lovers, best friends, soulmates. His parents were good people who kept their humanity in a world without any, and that is a legacy he is proud to continue.

—–-–—

Hershel Greene-Rhee never meets his father—at least in this life—but he is proud to be Glenn Rhee's son all the same.

—–-–—

 _I've never written TWD fanfic before, but the premiere upset me so much that I decided I had to at least try. My Gleggie shipper heart is absolutely broken and probably will be forever._


End file.
